Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation [Paperback]

Matthew Coolidge (Editor), Sarah Simons (Editor), Ralph Rugoff (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2006

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research-based educational organization that produces public programs about the built landscape of the United States from its sites in Los Angeles, Utah and the Mojave desert, with an upstate New York location opening in 2006. The Center's aim is to increase and diffuse information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. Recent examples of their work include a two-day "Tour of the Monuments of the Great American Void" by bus and the exhibit Immersed Remains: Towns Submerged in America. This book takes readers on a tour through the strangely unfamiliar land that Americans live in, demonstrating that we can understand ourselves and the nation by examining the clues on display all around us, often clearly visible but ignored. Each chapter explores a different topic, from an in-depth look at Ohio ("the most all-American state"); through scale shifts in model landscapes, exemplified in the three largest hydraulic models in the world; and law-enforcement training environments that "simulate" public space. Readers can dive into the hidden and enchanting world of show caves, where America is on display underground; and come up into the Great Basin, a zone covering most of Nevada, and portions of Utah, California, Oregon, Idaho and Mexico, whose network of watersheds has no outlet to the ocean. Following lines and edges, through cities, suburbs, small towns and wide-open spaces, the Center guides us upstream, toward the heart of another America--the same, but different.

Editorial Reviews

Review

September 24, 2006 Art Take Nature, Add Humans, Observe Results By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH IN 1957 an Air Force B-36 accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb onto empty scrubland outside Albuquerque. Although its nuclear payload was unarmed, the bomb's conventional explosives detonated on impact, creating a crater 12 feet deep, dusting the area with plutonium and killing a luckless cow. There used to be a town in New York State called Neversink. It sank from view in 1953 when the area was flooded to create a reservoir for New York City. The longest straight stretch of highway in the nation crosses the desert near Barstow, Calif. A road sign advises, "ABSOLUTELY NOTHING NEXT 22 MILES." Hundreds of sites like these, from the quirky to the quotidian, have been documented by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization founded in 1994 with an unusual educational mission. As dispassionately observant as anthropologists or space aliens, the center's staff members and volunteers roam the American landscape, recording and cataloging signs of humanity's interactions with nature. Anything from a trailer park to a strip mine, the Salton Sea to the Erie Canal, a building shaped like a picnic basket to a replica of ground zero for the Oliver Stone film falls within the group's purview. The approach is a mash-up of geography, geology, environmental studies, art, architecture and history. Occasionally the group's projects betray a Surrealist wit as well. The center once placed a loudspeaker in a lonely Maine forest and broadcast the recorded sound of a tree falling. More often, though, the center simply documents sites in photographs and descriptive text, letting each place express its own inherent character, be it an oddball tourist attraction like the World O' Tools Museum in Tennessee or a historically curious place like Coon Butte in Arizona Crater, where NASA trained Apollo crews because the area resembled the surface of the moon. The organization's founder, Matthew Coolidge, studied geomorphology - the evolution of land masses - at Boston University. "I'd sit in geography class hearing about braided streams," he recalled in a recent interview. "But when I looked out the window, I didn't see any streams. I saw buses and buildings." It occurred to him then that a geographer might treat the built environment and the natural landscape as one. "Increasingly humans are part of the geomorphological process," he said. "There isn't a molecule on the surface of the earth that hasn't passed through some human agent of change. It's unavoidable, don't you think? There are six billion of us now. I don't see how we could tread lightly." Mr. Coolidge and a small group of friends founded the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Oakland, Calif., then moved the office in 1996 to its current home in Los Angeles, next door to a similarly eccentric institution, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Grants from foundations finance the work of a staff of 10, augmented by volunteers around the country who, Mr. Coolidge said, include architects, urban planners, art students and teachers, photographers and "just people interested in what we do." "Overlook," a book edited by Mr. Coolidge and Sarah Simons and recently published by Metropolis Books, surveys many of the places that have interested the group over the years. There's a chapter on "show caves," like Howe Caverns in New York and Fantastic Caverns in Missouri, where proprietors amp up the natural subterranean grandeur with colored lights, patriotic music and gift shops. There's a chapter on simulated cities built for military and police training, and one devoted to the geographic, social and psychological centrality of Ohio. More detail can be found at the group's Web site, clui.org, which includes texts of its newsletter, The Lay of the Land, published quarterly since 1995, and the searchable Land Use Database, with thumbnail descriptions of sites in all 50 states. The New York State entries, for example, range from the Catskill Corners Kaleidoscope and Dick's Castle to Love Canal and the former Camp Hero, beloved of conspiracy theorists as the site of "the Philadelphia Experiment," in which a military ship was supposedly rendered invisible and "teleported" to Virginia. In researching the manmade environment, the center is often drawn to the frayed edges and forgotten margins of human sprawl: ghost towns, grim industrial zones, decaying waterfronts. At other times the group appears to be trying to locate and describe the precise middle of nowhere, somewhere out in the vast, open spaces that America sees fit for use only as hazardous waste dumps and nuclear test sites. The group has conducted guided tours of the Southern California desert, San Francisco Bay and Nellis Range in Nevada, a military testing and training area. (Since much of Nellis is off limits to civilians, the tour bus prowled the perimeter.) In the mid-1990's the center opened an outpost in the middle of nowhere: the abandoned Wendover Air Force Base in the desolate salt flats on the Nevada-Utah border near Bonneville. An empty wooden barracks was converted into an exhibition hall. There was no staff on site; a sign on the locked door led visitors to a nearby pay phone playing a recorded message about where to find the keybox. After viewing the exhibit, which described various ways humans have used the local landscape, visitors were to lock up and put the key back in the box. The door was later fitted with a keypad. The center has since opened two more outposts: a research station in the Mojave Desert and a Northeast region office in Troy, N.Y., where an exhibition, "Up River: Points of Interest on the Hudson From the Battery to Troy," is to open on Oct. 7. Although the group's free-ranging, multidisciplinary work eludes easy labels, it's no stretch to see it all as an ongoing conceptual art project on a continental scale, or to say that the omnivorous cataloging of late-industrial curiosities makes its archive a kind of 21st century cabinet of wonders. Like Bernd and Hilda Becher's mock-heroic images of anonymous grain elevators and water towers, the center's photographs, many of which are by Mr. Coolidge, are deadpan and foursquare on the surface but readily yield a sly wink or hint of melancholy. The rigorously maintained pose of clinical detachment is itself a kind of performance art. Invited for the first time to enter a work in the Whitney Biennial this year, the group installed a touch-screen "information kiosk" on its programs that would look just at home in a science fair. The cumulative effect of the center's research is the impression, perhaps unintended, that America is a big, weird place. Still, when drawing attention to the "former largest McDonald's" in the country, the smoke belching from a chemical weapons incinerator, or a crumbling resort on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, the center refrains from leading viewers to any conclusions, political or aesthetic. The lack of editorial comment, in contrast to didactic labels at museums and educational institutions that routinely tell visitors how to think, feels disarmingly subversive. "I suppose it can seem idiotic," Mr. Coolidge said, "but our approach really is to stumble across something and say: 'What is that? What is it for? How did it get there?' We try not to draw conclusions. A conclusion is the end of the journey. Learning happens along the way." (JOHN STRAUSBAUGH New York Times )

From the Publisher

From The Los Angeles Times

MAYBE you've never yearned for a tour of Mingo Junction, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and the rest of industrial Ohio. Maybe you were ready to start 2007 without an understanding of the interplay of nature and architecture in the show caves of Kentucky, Missouri and New Mexico. And maybe you've never cared about just what goes on in that odd little Culver City institution that calls itself CLUI. Yet still you may find yourself absorbed by "Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America With the Center for Land Use Interpretation," a coffee-table chronicle of land-use curiosities edited by Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons with an essay by Ralph Rugoff. The hallmarks of this 264-page, 8-by-10-inch paperback volume are deadpan descriptions and anonymous photography, all detailing weird, wonderful and (mostly) horrific things Americans have done to their landscape, including deliberately flooding the town of Neversink, N.Y., and practice-bombing Nevada. And here's the key to the CLUI way: Coolidge (CLUI's founder-director) and Simons would never use the word "horrific" in print, and probably not "ugly" either. In fact, their work stands out first for their embrace of territory that most Americans have either stopped seeing or never thought to look for and second for their refusal to make judgments....Coolidge and Simons have gone to great lengths to tell you where these things happen and what these places look like... But when it comes to forming an opinion or guessing at what these folks are driving at, that's our responsibility...it's provocative and even devious in an unprovable sort of way. In these days of polarized politics, hollering television heads and bullying bloggers, what could be more subversive than stacked facts and withheld opinions? --Christopher Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Metropolis Books (July 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933045337
• ISBN-13: 978-1933045337
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 8.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)